


Pause for Laughter

by AroAce_BigDisgrace



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Homophobic Language, M/M, One Shot, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Richie Tozier is a Little Shit, Two timelines, but its definitely there, every non richie character is just mentioned, homophobic jokes, it doesnt focus on the fix-it ness, some very very terrible jokes, think of the worst of the worst comedy-wise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-27 00:48:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20751560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AroAce_BigDisgrace/pseuds/AroAce_BigDisgrace
Summary: Richie Tozier's life, represented by two intertwined stand-up performances.He's thirty and just about to perform someone else's material. It doesn't feel quite right, but that's the standard. According to his agent, at least.He's forty and going on stage for the first time in months. The public wants to know what happened- why he bombed his last show, why he disappeared, and why he's come back from it all so different.





	Pause for Laughter

**Author's Note:**

> The jokes in this are,,, attempts. To say the least. For someone who wants to go into acting (and possibly comedy), I have no idea what the actual fuck I'm doing when it comes to writing humor.
> 
> This is the first fanfic that I've finished in years, so please tell me what you think!  
Or don't.  
Not that I care.  
...  
Baka.

There was a pit of dread in Richie’s stomach. This was his first real show in a theatre, not some dingy bar, surrounded by half-drunk assholes that only came to yell obscenities at poor, unsuspecting stand-up comics. He really hoped that he remembered all his jokes- well, not actually his jokes. The jokes that he’d hired someone to write for him.

Richie’s agent was insistent on him not using his own material. Something about it being “too crude”, which was absolutely ridiculous, seeing as all of the jokes he had lined up for tonight were about having sex with another man’s girlfriend. Which was absolutely ridiculous. Anyone who knew Richie Tozier was fully aware of the fact that he didn’t do relationships- hell, he hadn’t even gotten laid in years. Not that Richie was constantly talking about his failures with women. Some things just happened to be obvious to anyone with eyes.

It almost hurt to swallow with how dry his mouth was. Richie could blame anxiety if he really wanted, but he knew there was something more to it. Sure, he was going out there and making people laugh, which he absolutely loved. But it all seemed so fake.

Richie took a deep breath and walked on stage.

\----------------------------------

Richie felt like he was going to explode from all the anxiety. He’d been planning this for months, making sure that everything was perfect, that his jokes still landed despite the show’s less-than-funny opening. Fuck. He really needed a drink.

His palms coated themselves with sweat as he looked out into the audience. God, he hadn’t done that since high school theatre. But at least he had a real reason to be so anxious- five seats in the front row, each holding a member of the Loser’s Club. To be totally honest, Richie wasn’t sure how they’d all managed to carve a few hours out of their precious time. His childhood friends, and more than half ended up as Important People. Hell, even Eddie did well for himself- not to the level of Bill or Bev, but his old job gave good money, working for people that Richie vaguely remembered seeing on the news in-between segments like: ‘what’s the deal with those fucking millennials killing all our favorite restaurants’ and ‘this cat saved a tree from a fireman’.

Okay, maybe Richie only watched the news while totally stoned.

But that didn’t matter. What did, however, was the fact that his friends seemed to care enough about him to travel all the way to Chicago just to watch Richie spend hours doing bad voices. Well, doing bad voices and coming out to a crowd of thousands (and their phones, which were guaranteed to be recording by the time Richie hinted at his ‘dirty little secret’.)

He took a deep breath in, checking his phone to see how long he had before leaving his little bubble of panic. Five minutes.

Time passed without any explanation, leaving Richie with a headache and the feeling that he’d just stood still for a million years while simultaneously doing hundreds of push-ups. Well, it looked like it was time for Richie to head on stage and tell the truth that he’d spent forty years trying to escape.

\----------------------------------

“Hey there, fuckos! You’re probably wondering why this strange, clearly homeless man is standing in front of you, and what he did to the comedian you paid good money for. Well- time to be severely disappointed!”

Pause for laughter.

Richie didn’t totally get this first joke. Sure, he didn’t shave a lot (and smelled like cheap beer), plus he was wearing his old glasses from the nineties since he managed to lose his contacts in the bathroom of a club (don’t ask), but he didn’t look that bad, right?

Right?

Fuck, who was he kidding; Richie Tozier was a thirty-year-old trainwreck.

“So, I was talking to my girlfriend the other day, and I asked her why she was always so late coming back home after partying with all her friends. Turns out, she’s a lesbian.”

Pause for laughter.

“And I should have been disappointed, you know, since what guy wants to learn his dick’s been getting sucked by a girl that spends her free time fucking women with bigger balls than you’ll ever have, but I decided that it was all for the best. After all, if we end up as friends, maybe I’ll end up accidentally hiding in her closet while she has sex. And accidentally watch the whole thing. While accidentally jerking off to it.”

Internally cringe. Pause for laughter. Richie liked to spend the millisecond after this joke pretending that he was okay with the words that just stepped out of his mouth, onto the stage.

“Speaking of lesbians, is it just me or do you also notice that they’re always really bad at talking to people? You’d think that a person so experienced with her tongue would end up as a master of public speaking, but nope. Master of pubic speaking, maybe.”

\----------------------------------

“I bet you all missed me while I was gone! Oh, who am I kidding, I know you did. Ish. It’s impressive how many different theories you guys can come up with in just a few months. I’d like to take this moment to read aloud my personal favorites, if you would allow it.”

Richie took this moment to take an obscenely long list out of his pocket. There wasn’t anything on it, but what did it really matter? The audience was so far away they wouldn’t notice if he wrote the word ‘penis’ on it hundreds of times.

“Ahem. Numero uno: the incredibly handsome and suave comedian Richie Tozier has gone on an unplanned hiatus due to his agent dropping him. Well, that one was wrong. But I’ve gotta admit that you did well with what you were given- one unfunny comedian plus one total disaster of a show equals one unfunny, unemployed comedian. Obviously. I’m saying this from personal experience, as some performances of mine have ended spectacularly. If by spectacularly, you mean with a comedian that hasn’t showered in a week puking all over the stage. Don’t worry- that one’s on YouTube for the whole world to see. Forever.”

Pause for laughter. Not much laughter, though. There was no doubt in Richie’s mind that the audience could sense his unease, as the whole crowd had a dash of dread thrown in it.

“Numero dos: the incredibly handsome and suave comedian Richie Tozier has finally gone to rehab/overdosed/gotten stabbed by a prostitute. I’m not totally sure how that last one gained traction, but it’s creative, I’ll give you that. Just to clear it up, I wasn’t in rehab, and I definitely didn’t die. I think.”

Richie breathed in. And out. And in. And out. He had to calm down a bit before the next part.

“And that’s as far as I know how to count in Spanish. Good thing too, because after those theories it gets ~really~ weird. Now, I have no doubt that you’re wondering what I was really doing for all those months. Well, here it is, in all its spicy glory:”

Richie dropped his smile and adopted the face of an incredibly boring coworker talking about his weekend.

“I had to meet up with some friends.”

“Boring, right? It’s such a bland reason for my last show to have crashed and burned, I know, but it’s the truth. My friend called me right before I went onstage, totally out of the blue, and I was slapped in the face with childhood nostalgia so hard that I puked before walking on stage and acting like a total zombie. Anyways, back to my old friends. Now, all of you in the front may have wondered why the hell a famous novelist, a fashion designer, and a world-renowned architect are sitting directly in the center, along with two random fuckwads. Well, those are the people I grew up with!”

When Richie was writing his show, he sent every draft to the Losers, obsessively making sure that he didn’t reveal anything that they wouldn’t be comfortable with the whole world knowing. Even so, he knew that they wouldn’t be ready for the onslaught of messages on Twitter.

Richie paused for the confusion, quietly smirking as he watched his audience process what he just said.

“But now that you’ve met my friends, I should probably start talking about the strange, strange time known as my childhood.”

\----------------------------------

“Okay, so when I was growing up, I stole Playboy magazines from a corner store nearby.”

Wrong.

“I never got caught, but there was this one time that I had to sandwich the sacred text in between the first two things I saw in order to hide it from some underpaid dickwad, who was totally obsessed with not letting children steal pornography. So mean.”

Still wrong.

“So I frantically shove my hand on a shelf and snatch the first two things I can get ahold of- a box of heavy-flow tampons and a box of pads. Which, like, ew. I had no idea that I was in ~that~ section, so I totally freaked out. But my awkward twelve year old self wasn’t about to put them back and admit to having taken a Playboy. So the poor convenience store guy was forced to pass by some uncomfortable kid who had barely even started puberty carrying boxes of vagina-blood collectors.”

So, so wrong.

“And it wasn’t like I was just going to let him assume that I was getting them for myself. I mean, I was an awkward pre-teen with long-ish hair whose voice hadn’t changed yet- god knows what that man would’ve assumed about me. So, I muster up the deepest, manliest voice I can and say: ‘Sup, man. Just, uh, getting these for my girlfriend.’ Which was a lie. Unfortunately, being a total chick magnet is something I had to learn over time, so I was totally clueless back then.”

“And the guy just stares directly into my eyes. I felt like he could see my soul, and knew all my sins without even saying a word. He could tell that I was lying. Admittedly, anyone could have told that the twelve year old with glasses way too big for his face didn’t have a girlfriend, but whatever. So, I did what any rational kid would do, and sprinted away, knocking over a glasses-stand in the process. I never came back to that store. Hell, I totally avoided that street for years just in case someone recognised me from my definitely-infamous escape and called the police.”

\----------------------------------

“So, I was sitting there on the bridge- which, I should probably mention, was mostly known as the kissing bridge by my town. And I was thinking to myself: ‘Wow. This bridge would look so much better with my initials on it. And also a plus sign. Followed by my best friend’s initials.’ So I took my sad little pocket knife and started to carve out ‘R+E’. You know, that classic friend thing where you carve your initials into a bridge specifically known for romance. It took until a few months ago for me to finally show my friend those squiggly little letters, and it took them less than a second to start to lecture me on the dangers of splinters. Fucking hypochondriacs.”

Pause for laughter. Richie looked out into the audience, right where he thought Eddie was sitting. Sure, he couldn’t really see anything but people-shaped shadows from onstage, but it was the shortest of the center blobs, so he ran with it. And hoped that he didn’t just imply that some poor, unsuspecting audience member was a hypochondriac.

“Speaking of my best friend slash childhood crush, I had terrible taste. No offense. My adolescent-ass had the choice of any fish in the sea. Well, any fish around my age in a small town... sea. Pond? Lake? Metaphors are hard. Anyways, I could have picked anyone, and I decided to fall in love with a tiny, wheezy ball of constantly angry energy. Seriously. Every conversation we had would turn into a heated argument about the least relevant shit ever- like, ‘You didn’t get the specific flavor of ice cream I wanted, but that’s fine because I fucked your sister last night’. That kind of thing. Actually, and I’m not going into too much detail on this one since the wound is still fresh, but there was a point where I thought my best friend was going to die, and their last words to me would have been “I fucked your mom.” Romantic, I know.”

It was time for Richie to come out. He wasn’t ready. He doubted that he’d ever be ready. But this was his best chance, so he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and prepared.

“Luckily, they didn’t die, so we finally got to address what my friend Bill called “The worst case of unresolved sexual tension I’ve ever had to deal with and I’m a fucking author, Richie.” Oh- and before you ask, I am talking about the author Bill Denbrough- master of horror, suspense, mystery, and everything else that isn’t writing endings. Actually, I got to preview one of his books that’s coming out soon, and the ending is great. Character growth, am I right?”

“Back to my main topic. So, we got to finally talk to each other about our feelings, which was amazing! To be totally honest, I was planning on keeping that whole deal a secret. Forever. And then dying. But that’s probably because I didn’t know that they liked me back- and now we’re engaged! And I feel like now would be the best time to address the elephant in the room. The big, confusing question that you all probably have. ‘Why the fuck is Richie Tozier, notable ladies’ man, playing the pronoun game with us right now?’ There’s a pretty simple answer to that- I, Richie “Trashmouth” Tozier, am a raging homosexual.”

Pause for, well, something.

“A raging homosexual that’s going to marry the man that he’s been in love with for the past twenty-seven years.”

\----------------------------------

After an hour of talking to a crowd, Richie was finally done. It felt so strange to be lying to the audience. Sure, it was pretty standard for comedy, but Richie had never really done this before.

He grabbed a bottle of booze, not bothering to actually read the label before taking a giant swig. All that really mattered was the final destination that drinking would lead him to- drunk and totally gone from the world, just like he always was after a show. No matter how successful Richie got, how well-known in the world of comedy, he never felt truly happy. He was incomplete, a puzzle missing pieces that had been swept under the rug, never to be found again. But that’s just life, he supposed.

\----------------------------------

Leaving the stage, Richie took off his glasses, cleaning them on his shirt and hoping that he didn’t just smudge them even more. The show was over. His name was guaranteed to be spread around the internet, getting too much recognition for something that, logically, wasn’t that big of a deal. But, of course, coming out was bound to be a big deal for a man who spent thirty years in denial of his sexuality. Especially if said denial was plastered all around the world in the form of stand-up videos on YouTube.

Richie felt a bit alone, surrounded by crew members with much more important things on their hands, but that wasn’t going to last very long. His friends were waiting backstage, and he was just steps away from them, steps away from the one thing that’d been missing from his life for so long.

It may have taken twenty-seven years, but Richie was finally complete.


End file.
